August 12, 2007

Under the Surface of Azeroth

Who says you can't mix work with pleasure? I've done both in my latest article, Under the Surface of Azeroth: A Network Baseline and Security Analysis of Blizzard's World of Warcraft. Do you know someone at work who runs...
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April 14, 2001

Time for Lunch!

The simple task of performing a network baseline can occasionally uncover some very interesting trends. Team Uptime was looking through some utilization charts that detailed absolute network utilization over a week?s time on a client?s token ring network. This chart detailed the utilization of the network as a percentage from one to one hundred, with averages taken every five minutes. A Network General (now Network Associates) Sniffer generated this utilization value, so the process of compiling these statistics did not impact the network utilization as a RMON probe would.

March 18, 2001

How NOT to Troubleshoot a Network

March 14, 2001

The Case of the DOS Database Delay

The day started simply enough. I had a cup of java, a couple of network reports, and took a quick check over the file servers. The network was running well, probably because most people were out of the office over the holiday break. The calm air should have been my first clue.

February 14, 2001

Complex Simplicity

We received a call from a small and growing company that was having intermittent problems with their network switch. This problem had everything a network analyst loved to hate; intermittent problems and hardware issues. We packed heavy for this visit. We carried our laptops, a Sniffer, RMON probes, and the appropriate cables necessary to connect to the management port of the LAN switch. We knew this was a small company, but we were intrigued by the company's network configuration. This client was reported to have about 50-60 workstations, Novell Netware, Windows NT, Ethernet, and token ring topologies. Why would such a small company have such a mish-mosh of networking technologies? The grim foreboding of this visit hung in the air.